PUBLICS AND MARKETS What’s wrong with Neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism has become a key object of analysis in human geography in the last decade. Although the words neoliberal and neoliberalism have been around for a long while, it is only since the end of the 1990s that they have taken on the aura of grand theoretical terms. 'Neoliberalism' emerges as an object of conceptual and empirical reflection in the process of restoring to view a sense of political agency to processes previously dubbed globalization (Hay 2002). This chapter examines the way in which neoliberalism is conceptualised in human geography. It argues that, in theorisizing neoliberalism as 'a political project', critical human geographers have ended up reproducing the same problem they ascribe to the ideas they take to be driving forces behind contemporary transformations: they reduce the social to a residual effect of more fundamental political-economic rationalities. Proponents of free-markets think that people should act like utility-maximising rational egoists, despite lots of evidence that they don't. Critics of neoliberalism tend to assume that increasingly people do act like this, but they think that they ought not to. For critics, this is what's wrong with neoliberalism. And it is precisely this evaluation that suggests that there is something wrong with how neoliberalism is theorized in critical human geography. In critical human geography, neoliberalism refers in the first instance to a family of ideas associated with the revival of economic liberalism in the mid-twentieth century. This is taken to include the school of Austrian economics associated with Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, and Joseph Schumpeter, characterised by a strong